On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 00:10, Ian Cheong wrote: > A govt economist I once spoke to said that in (unspecified) health > systems he has looked at, governments seem to contribute about 6% of > GDP.
Only holds true if you limit your assessment to a small handful of governments and ignore the world at large. Most European governments spend well in excess of 12% (twice the percentage your economist mentioned) of their GDP directly on health All a matter of priorities. Some governments choose to spend more on military or subsidizing inefficient industries, others choose to spend more on health and education. I know what government I would choose. At the end of the day, private systems almost invariably cost more some way or another because they need to make *profit* and that profit is not spent on the purpose = money is siphoned away. That does not hold true in countries with abysmal public organisation levels - those with such inefficient bureaucrazies that their apparatchik wastes more money than the private sector would siphon off profits. Whether a person pays for health care via tax or via private expenditure is the same to that person - every dollar spent is one dollar less they can spend. Question is where that person gets the bigger bang for buck. I conclude that if the Australian government would pull their smelly finger out and streamline public administration (get rid of the hopeless state system for a start, leave micromanagement to those who actually do the work, and maybe deport 90% of the lawyers to Nauru) and embrace modern administrative tools (e.g. IT) they could provide a far better bang for buck to every Australian in terms of health provision than any private provider ever could Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
